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As a child living in Haiti, Michel DeGraff primarily learned to speak and read French. And as an ambitious student, he did so with good reason: French has been the language of the country’s educated classes and social elites virtually since Haiti gained independence in 1804, even though the vast majority of its citizens speak only Haitian Creole, a linguistic descendant of French with influences from West and Central African languages.

“When I was growing up, in a middle-class family and in my school, Creole wasn’t viewed as a real language,” DeGraff says. “It was a given that you could only be successful in French.”

Over the years, many observers have disparaged Haitian Creole as a primitive tongue incapable of expressing complex concepts, while linguists have generally asserted that it is descended from a pidgin language. DeGraff emphatically disputes this. The associate professor of linguistics at MIT has spent years presenting evidence that Haitian Creole is just as sophisticated as other languages, publishing papers in journals such as Language, Language in Society, Linguistic Anthropology and Linguistic Typology.

“It is clear that Haitian Creole cannot be taken to have evolved via some exceptional processes that would make creolization radically different from ‘normal’ processes of language change,” DeGraff wrote in a 2009 edited volume, The Languages of Africa and the Diaspora.

Moreover, he argues that the whole notion of “creole” languages — those deemed a skeletal combination of other languages — is a flawed construct reflecting colonial attitudes and reinforcing the interests of the social elite.

“As far as I can tell, there is no rigorous, scientific way to determine what is a creole language,” DeGraff says.

The fact that Haitian Creole is regarded as an inferior language has significant social consequences. While Creole has been recognized as one of Haiti’s two official languages since 1987, French still dominates the country’s educational system and government; the country’s official newspaper still publishes laws, budgets, contracts and other important documents in French. For this reason, DeGraff’s work includes an active interest in education policy. This year, he has created and implemented a research project, funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), using computers to help teach mathematics in Haitian Creole in primary-school classrooms.

With Haiti still rebuilding following the devastating earthquake of January 2010, DeGraff thinks the time is right to bring Haitian Creole into schools as the main language of instruction. “Now there is a chance to do things better,” he says. Otherwise, valuable aid to Haitian schools “will enlarge the cruel divide between the few haves and the millions of have-nots,” DeGraff wrote in an op-ed for The Boston Globe last year.‘Haitian Creole is very well-behaved’

DeGraff did not become a linguist via a traditional path. He left Haiti in 1982 to pursue his undergraduate degree in computer science at the City College of New York. During an internship at Bell Labs in New Jersey, in 1985, DeGraff worked on a natural language processing project intended to create computer voice-synthesis programs that would read texts such as The New York Times aloud for blind people. In the process, he became fascinated with linguistics. His PhD, from the University of Pennsylvania in 1992, was in computer science, but there were more linguists than computer scientists on his exam committee.

“I’ve had an unusual linguistics career,” DeGraff observes with a chuckle.

Since the mid-1990s, he has published dozens of articles making the case against “Creole exceptionalism.” As DeGraff points out, stereotypes about creoles have long existed; one linguist wrote in 1883, “Creole speech is universally accepted as an infantile jargon.” Others have written in recent decades that creoles serve as “missing linguistic fossils,” according to a Newsweek article from 1982, replicating the primitive form of more highly evolved languages.

DeGraff finds the notion of Haitian Creole as a special and primitive mixture of other languages to be dubious. For one thing, its lexicon is more homogeneous than that of English: About 90 percent of Haitian Creole words are derived from French, while English, a Germanic language, derives only 35 percent of its words from its Germanic ancestors.

“If you didn’t know that Haitian Creole was called ‘Creole,’ and you didn’t know what English was, you might end up with the conclusion that English is a radical creole, and that Haitian Creole is very well-behaved,” DeGraff says.

Some observers have contended that Haitian Creole, like other creoles, is only a mixture in the sense of blending European-derived vocabulary and West African language rules. But this claim also falls apart upon closer inspection, DeGraff contends. Haitian syntax does differ from French syntax — but in the same manner that Modern English syntax differs from Old English syntax.

In Haitian Creole, for instance, it is correct to say “Bouki pa konnen Boukinet” — meaning, “Bouki doesn’t know Boukinet” — with the negation word “pa” preceding the verb. In French, by contrast, one would say “Bouqui ne connait pas Bouquinette,” with “pas” coming after the verb.

But Modern English differs from Old English in the same way. Chaucer’s Merchant’s Tale, for instance, says, “Quene Ester looked never with switch an eye”; in Modern English, the negation word “never” would precede the verb. In short, Haitian Creole and English have similar evolutionary paths, in terms of syntax.

Linguists still disagree about the status of Haitian Creole, but many have found DeGraff’s evidence to be compelling. “His work shows that, fundamentally, these languages are structurally and developmentally no different from other languages,” says Jo Anne Kleifgen, a professor of linguistics and education at Columbia University’s Teachers College.

“I think Michel has driven everyone to be a little more conscious of the social implications of their positions,” says Salikoko Mufwene, a linguist and the Frank J. McLoraine Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago.Bringing Creole to the classroom

DeGraff’s research on Creole has only reinforced his hands-on interest in education. In connection with his NSF grant, DeGraff is working with a school in a remote mountain village on Haiti’s La Gonave island to test Creole-language instruction among fourth graders. The project uses computer programs to teach math in Creole, while avoiding the practice of rote memorization that often accompanies French-language teaching.

“If you go to a typical science or math class, you don’t see that much science or math going on,” DeGraff says. “What you see is this obsession with getting the French right — an impossible and humiliating challenge since most of the kids and their teachers live in communities where French is hardly ever spoken.”

Over the years, DeGraff’s advocacy of native-language instruction for Creole speakers has influenced other scholars. Kleifgen notes that her graduate students have used DeGraff’s ideas as the inspiration for fieldwork projects of their own, including one education program for children in Eritrean and Somali refugee camps and another that introduced a New York City high-school curriculum meant to build awareness of Patwa, Jamaica’s English-derived Creole.

Attitudes about the use of Creole may be changing in Haiti, too. In April, Haitians elected as their new president Michel Martelly, a former pop musician whose songs are in Haitian Creole. Because of the deeply entrenched attitudes about Haitian Creole among the country’s elites, it is not yet clear, DeGraff notes, whether any language policy changes will occur, though he hopes the use of Haitian Creole in Martelly’s campaign bodes well for its application to other areas of life as well.

In any event, DeGraff will continue his own work in a career that would have once seemed improbable. At one time, he says, his parents “couldn’t quite believe that my research on Haitian Creole was part of a paid job at MIT. This is the language I was not supposed to be speaking. Now they understand it’s my life’s work.”

Comments

Molly Ruggles

May 12, 2011

I'm deeply excited by the work of Prof DeGraff. And I hope that his support of the Haitian Creole language will not only serve to empower Creole speakers in Haiti, but also serve to uncover wonderful literature and art that exists in the Creole context.

Similar to the way the African American jazz and blues have deeply enriched all areas of music in American culture, so too, Haitian Creole may do so for Haitian literature and culture.

I'm very proud to work in a university that supports the kind of research that DeGraff is exploring. What a wonderful article. Mèsi anpil!

Amankwah

May 12, 2011

Congratulations Prof. DeGraff on your achievement. You are an inspiration to us all. Keep up the good work.

Randy

May 23, 2011

Oh, I see now only comments in English will post here, I'll look for you on FB. I too will be teaching children and adults Haitian Kreyol this summer, in a total immersion method for me (and them).

I will,look for your work to further guide me. I will be using tiny Kreyol story books, they are posted on my website, www.ifpigscouldflyhaiti.org Guy Antoine gave me the books last year, and our community REALLY liked hearing them, reading them.

roamworld

June 2, 2011

Great effort... MIT is a great university and people like you make it the way it is

Myriam Augustin

June 2, 2011

Congratulations to you Professor DeGraff for the extraordinary work you are doing in Haiti. I hope that this will support the acceptance of the use of the native language in instruction in Haiti, which will help the children to develop self-esteem and relevance within the educational system of their country. I also hope that this will open doors to more meaningful and authentic work that can help the children to reach their highest potential.

How wonderful to see your Haiti work profiled. You are extraordinary, Michel.

Denise Hernandez

February 2, 2012

Michel has inspired me to be more appreciative of my heritage and embrace Creole as my native language. As a child, I was not allowed to speak Creole and I had to speak French even to the help who did not understand French.

Now I can clearly see his point and purpose to make sure that we all accept and embrace the Creole language which is a very important part of being Haitian and speak it with pride.

Roger Demonmon

September 24, 2012

Though very enthusiastic about Dr. DeGraff's work on Haitian Creole, I must point to his attention that Mr. Aristide, Mr. Evans Paul, Mr. René Préval and several other Haitian politicians for that matter did campaign in Creole well before President Martelly was really thinking of becoming a politician. These politicians, among others whom I apologize to for not mentioning their name here, really connected with the majority of Haitians through Creole. Many if not all of Preval's presidential decrees (at least during his 2nd term) were published in the Official Journal both in French and Creole. As a matter of fact. Mr. Martelly began his presidency with speeches that were mostly written in a very old and very traditional Haitian (Duvalierist) ''political French'' until someone probably corrected that flaw. Still if one listens to Martelly's speeches, they are mostly exercises in old Haitian/French rhetoric.

Reine C. Leroy, Ed.D.

April 25, 2013

Congratulations to Dr. DeGraff for his support of Haitian Creole instruction in schools in Haiti. I truly believe that we cannot educate our people if we continue to force them to learn in a language that isn't their own. French should be taught as a second language in the schools, not as a first language. Research has shown that instruction in native languages fosters high self-esteem and pride in children (and even adults), which in turn translates into higher achievement and success in schools. Keep up the good work!